The first computer hard drive ever shipped had a capacity of less than five megabytes. Now, thousands and thousands of gigabytes of data are being generated every day. Everything from text to pictures to videos is being stored to storage drives, often remotely via the cloud. A website or service that allows users to upload media must store vast amounts of data. This storage burden is further increased by the fact that many organizations create and store duplicate copies of code and data for disaster-recovery, testing, regulatory, or other purposes. Some organizations outsource this responsibility while other organizations manage their own data centers full of servers and storage drives.
The density at which storage drives can store information has increased over the years. New technologies such as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and microwave assistance magnetic record (MAMR), for example, will help make reading and writing to a smaller area easier. However, when large numbers of disk-based storage drives are grouped together to allow for the storage of massive amounts of data in a data center, the heat naturally increases. This heat can decrease or limit the performance of the storage drives. Conventional approaches, such as blowing fans, for air cooling may work to maintain suitable operating temperatures, but can introduce high-frequency noise or vibrations that can decrease or limit the performance of the storage drives by degrading the precision with which the drives can read and write data. Accordingly, conventional approaches to heat mitigation for large groups of disk-based storage drives have not been entirely satisfactory.